The Mac Pro’s premier feature is its “unified thermal core”, which is a shorthand way of describing its overall design with all of the components facing inward and the heat dissipation working vertically, all aided by a single bottom-mounted intake fan.

Running on up to a 12-core IntelXeon processor (with 3.9GHz Turbo), the Mac Pro boasts dual AMD FirePro GPUs (up to 12GB of G-DDR5 VRAM, 528GBps bandwidth, up to 7 teraflops); up to 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 memory with a four-channel controller and up to 60GBps bandwidth; and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage (up to 1.2/1GBps read/write speeds).

It also features six Thunderbolt 2 ports, dual Ethernet ports, HDMI, four USB 3.0 ports, a lone audio input, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a motion sensor. The system will ship with Mac OS X Mavericks and can support up to three 4K displays.

For all the superb components the Mac Pro boasts, the chassis is tiny; it stands just 9.9 inches high. It’s a completely re-thought take on a workstation machine, and it can be yours in December, starting at $2,999. The starting price gets you a quad-core Intel Xeon E5 (3.7GHz), dual AMD FirePro GPUs (2GB VRAM each), 12Gb of memory, and 256GB PCIe flash storage.

You can imagine how much a fully loaded Mac Pro might cost, but even the base configuration is a beastly rig.